Thursday, July 29, 2010

As a personal interest I have been working with and following developments of IPv6 for several years. I started presented on IPv6 back in 2006 because of what was happening with Windows Vista and the changes that Microsoft was doing with the OS and their new networking stack. Here we are in 2010 and I think we are past early adopters in regards to IPv6. In fact, I now think if you are not paying attention to what is happening with IPv6 it could start impacting your ability to perform your job soon, especially if you are an IT Professional.

So, who do I think will be impacted the most by the transition and more prolific use of IPv6? I think you might be surprised.

The standard answer is network engineers and granted they indeed will be rolling out and maintaining dual IPv4/IPv6 networks for years to come but I actually don't think IPv6 will be as much of a challenge for network engineers to get up and running assuming they have moderately newer network equipment. Granted, there are issues with lack of feature parity but that will be resolved over time and will be fast tracked when equipment manufactures realize they are losing sales due to the lack of the parity.

Next on the list is system admins. I think many will find IPv6 to be a bit more of a challenge in regards to the differences in behavior of the protocol and getting worked out the behavior differences of applications as a result. This is a huge issue for client machines in terms of what OS you are running on your desktop and what the server does or does not support. I would argue that the majority of system admins know enough IPv4 networking to allow them to do their job but likely will have some challenges with differences in IPv6. I know there are some great system admins out there who could run networks also so obviously this a wildly general statement but I still feel there is going to be a bigger learning curve for system admins than they care to admit. Perhaps it is time for Microsoft to bring back a dedicated networking exam - like the old MCP TCP/IP exam?

The surprise group is application developers and database admins. Just think about how much code has been written out there to account for IPv4 addresses. IPv4 addresses are 32bit and I would imagine the majority of applications out there are storing that value under a declared INTEGER. I could be wrong - maybe they are all stored as a STRING instead but I have a feeling that isn't the case. IPv6 addresses on the other hand are 128bit and likely the majority of applications will have to be modified to account for the new size, difference in how they are represented (in HEX not DEC) and also the fact that the application might potentially have to pay attention to which interface it is directing traffic through. This doesn't even cover all the databases out there that are storing IPv4 information and the SQLNET statements all based around IPv4 to query those databases.

To top it all off, IPv6 can represented an address in multiple ways due to the zero compression option. So searching through logs or analyzing output could be an additional issue unless some standards are agreed to in advance in terms of how to store and represent an IPv6 address. So imagine trying to correlate information from multiple systems and they can't match stuff because the IPv6 addresses are represented differently in each system. I think some of these issues will be the biggest road blocks to overcome in the months and years ahead for IPv6.

So, why is it important to pay attention to IPv6 now? It is important because the adoption and momentum behind the protocol has already begun. Major content providers like Facebook and network providers like Comcast and content delivery providers like Limelight have all deployed IPv6 already and are doing their trials now. If you have no knowledge or understanding of IPv6 how will you address your business needs when you need to either access content, deliver content or work with a network when you don't understand the protocol they are using to move traffic?

In short, if you don't have a working understanding of IPv6, you are already behind. Take a quick quiz. Do you know what behavior Windows 7 has when it has a public IPv4 address? What is different if it gets a public IPv6 address? Which protocol does it use for DNS resolution if it has both an IPv4 and IPv6 address? Does the type of IPv6 address it has matter to the default behavior? This is all just for Windows 7, now do this for OSX, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2008R2, Linux and Solaris. How did you do?- Ed

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

I have been setting up a lot more NetFlow on Cisco ASA's recently. Mainly due to the request for more visibility into the traffic that is consuming Internet bandwidth and for compliance reasons. It seems that even with proxy services and other solutions many IT organizations still have a poor understanding of the actual traffic traversing their network.

Since NetFlow is limited in terms of platform support (specifically the Cisco Catalyst 3k/2k switches do NOT support it) but the Cisco ASA does I have been asked to turn it on the ASA to have a better idea what is going across the network. Cisco has a nice Introduction to Cisco IOS NetFlow if you need to run it on the routing or 4500/6500 platforms which is a great way to go in addition to the ASA as you can then see what is happening between devices on the network also.

Chapter 75 in the Cisco ASA 8.2 CLI Configuration Guide covers how to set up a NetFlow configuration. Here is a short script to get it up and running quickly. A couple of caveats, read the config guide because it covers the parameters for timing and limiting what you are collecting. This script is a "let's get this going, send me everything" sort of solution. Not optimal for heavily loaded ASA's. Should be good enough to get you going though.

!#####! - NetFlow script for Cisco ASA!! - ACL to catch all IP traffic - to specify the traffic you are interested inaccess-list flow_export_acl extended permit ip any any!! - set up the destination server ip and template rateflow-export destination {interface name} {IP address} {port #}flow-export template timeout-rate 1!! - build out the class-map for the flow that matches the ACLclass-map flow_export_class match access-list flow_export_acl! - or don't use an ACL by using match any!! - build out the policy-mappolicy-map flow_export_policy class flow_export_class flow-export event-type all destination {IP address}!! - apply the policy-map to whatever global policy you have or make oneservice-policy flow_export_policy global!! - if you have an existing policy-map apply the class-map into that one! - for instance the default ASA service-policy for global is global_policy! - so you could add the class-map to it by doingpolicy-map global_policy class flow_export_class flow-export event-type all destination {IP address}!!#####

You can get information about what the ASA is doing in terms of the flow output by using the following commands:show flow-export countersshow service-policy global flow ip host {source IP} host {dest IP}show access-list flow_export_aclObviously you need some sort of NetFlow collector. There are a lot of professional and free tools to do this and there are some great vendors doing this. That being said, I have used Plixer's Scrutinizer free product to at least get folks up and working and have a functional tool to look at until they can decide what tool they want to use. It does and excellent job of showing what is possible in terms of reporting and information gathering. That being said the following companies also have NetFlow commercial products you should consider or have free offerings that can be used.AdventNetNetQoS - part of CA nowNTOP - opensource toolSolarWinds

I am leaving off a ton of vendors in the list but I have found if I list everyone who is doing a solution then folks who are trying it out freeze up and can't pick one. I know, not a great reason but I rather have them use something than nothing at all.

Cisco owns the NetFlow name but there is a standards version of NetFlow supported by many other networking vendors called sFlow. Basically it provides the same sort of function but on other vendor equipment. This means that almost all NetFlow collectors can work with sFlow. So if desired you can collect from non Cisco devices that support sFlow to the same collector to get a more complete view from around your network.

If you have not deployed and made use of NetFlow I really recommend doing a quick trial run. You may be surprised by what you find. I've had clients discover employee's watching video and tv shows being pulled from foreign countries (some of questionable content), others consuming high bandwidth across tunneled links they did not know they were running and lots of other interesting items. Many have been surprised how much IPv6 and tunneled IPv6 they are running on their network. It is a great tool so check it out.- Ed

Thursday, July 15, 2010

I've been watching some of the network manufacture market transitions happening right now and the rapid changes going on in the data center and networking market space. I think there will be four main players who I am calling the four datacenter horsemen who will be calling the shots in the future - leading players of the apocalypse I guess. This is all me having fun guessing what will go on so don't hold me to it and of course, this is only my opinion.

Team #1 is made up of Cisco/EMC/VMware due to their partnership arrangement. This partnership for taking over the data center is what caused all sorts of realignments in the industry in the first place. Specifically, with the falling out of HP and Cisco over servers and HP now having a full portfolio of network, servers and storage to go after the data center space that Cisco has traditionally shared with HP it begs the question - what next?

Granted I agree that HP, team #2, does not have a fully competitive network/storage solution when compared to the Cisco Nexus + UCS solution but they are close enough that folks are picking sides. Certainly it can be argued that HP has much more depth in the server market space and a longer deeper relationship with Microsoft to cover the hypervisor gap.

So, what other teams are out there? We can't leave IBM out of the game, they have a partner arrangement with Juniper and I would not be surprised if IBM considered buying Juniper up to cover the gap in the network portfolio. IBM has storage covered and has been doing professional services and large scale data center work since the beginning of the industry - so I say they are team #3.

Who is team #4? I think Oracle with their recent Sun acquisition is the answer. I also think since they have a storage arm from Sun that they could easily fill the networking gap by buying Brocade and then potentially developing in house (Sun team) a networking solution complement to the Foundry arm of Brocade or picking up a smaller Ethernet vendor like Force10 or Extreme to help round out the portfolio. Oracle already has a hypervisior and so does Sun so they have lots of software to leverage and they can strong arm customers into buying a "blessed" data center deployment solution that runs Oracle top to bottom and compete against everyone else.

So, who is left out of this game? I guess Dell falls back to a distant #5, and while they technically have server, storage (EqualLogic) and network their story is incomplete and their solution do not align with a complete data center story. Also marginalized are SAP, Microsoft, Novell, RedHat, Citrix and several others that used to have very strategic partnerships which now will not be as important for those four horsemen in the immediate future. And then there are folks like NetApp, F5, Riverbed, Infoblox and others who will have to fit into this ecosystem partner arrangement without being swallowed up.

I think the next 3-4 years are going to be some of the most interesting and fast moving for the data center market space. To think, we haven't even addressed the SaaS/Cloud market space that Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure) and others are rapidly pushing forward. Perhaps Microsoft will leapfrog everyone at the end of the day and the four datacenter horsemen won't even be relevant because you won't need a data center anymore. Hard to imagine? Is that the real apocalypse for data center, where the four horsemen aren't even relevant to the process for most customers?- Ed

Thursday, July 01, 2010

I am happy to say I have been renewed as a Microsoft MVP. This year I've been awarded in the Desktop Experience category. This is my third category so far in the program. A brief look back as I was first award in July 2004.

I still plan on being actively involved and paying attention to what is going on in Security and more specifically in networking. Most of the focus will be around IPv6 as I am now a co-chair on the California IPv6 Task Force.

I needs to extend some thanks to some Microsoft folks:Jake Grey - MVP LeadEmily Freet - MVP Regional Manager, AmericasStephen Rose - Sr. Community Manager - Windows OSChris Avis, Harold Wong and Chris Henley - IT Pro Evangelist - DPE - West Region teamAlso, thanks to Jennelle Crothers - fellow Microsoft MVP and PacITPros member for helping to make the User Group experience what it is, couldn't have made it this far without your help.- Ed